Nobody Knows Who You Are (Spider-Man: Life Story)

What follows is an article that wasn't published in PanelXPanel due to being too similar to other articles in the magazine. It was written on 7/9/19 over the course of a single day. Another article I wrote was featured in that PanelXPanel can be found here.

Hey, turns out I'm absolutely right about
absolutely everything!

Spider-Man: Life Story asks the question of what would happen if Spider-Man’s story was told in real time. If he grew older and older with each passing decade and had to deal with the countless political upheavals the United States went through. On the surface, it seems like a simple premise. Indeed, John Byrne did it with the relationship of Batman and Superman in his Generations trilogy. But the story Spider-Man: Life Story wishes to tell is of Spider-Man’s place in the world, one that hopes to understand what Spider-Man is about.

If one is to tell the story of Spider-Man as Spider-Man: Life Story purports to do, then one must first understand the nature of Spider-Man’s narrative. The thematic core that acts as a through line for that story and that story alone. For some superheroes, such things are obvious. To give an example, Batman is the story of how found families forged through trauma can help make a person better. And many have argued that Spider-Man is likewise an easy superhero to understand the story of: With Great Power, There Must Also Come… Great Responsibility. And there’s certainly an argument to be made on that front. There are loads of Spider-Man stories that explore the ways in which power and responsibility collide with one another.

There’s just one problem: every single superhero is about the implications of great power and how to use it responsibly. There’s that one famous Green Lantern story about how he will fight to free the green people, the purple people, the yellow people, but will he fight to free the black ones. Marvelman is literally about the sheer horror of giving people such great power and how their idea of acting responsibly with it is through creating a fascist utopia where criminals are rehabilitated through mind control. All Star Superman, by contrast, is about what one man does when faced with the end of his life, and how much responsibility he has to the world he leaves behind. Hell, “Must there be a Superman” is a rephrasing of the question “What is the responsibility of those with great power?”

That’s not to say all superhero stories fall into this axiom. I will admit that the All Star Superman comparison is a bit of a stretch. But much in the same way that not all detective stories are about problem solving, the ghost of the relationship between power and responsibility still lurks within the narrative shape of it all. So then, if Spider-Man isn’t just about power and responsibility, then what is it all about?

Consider how Spider-Man: Life Story uses the concepts of power and responsibility. For the most part, these stories consist of Spider-Man being presented with an issue wherein he has to choose between doing something for his friends/family/job or stopping the bad guy from hurting people. But at the same time, Peter is an active member of the world. He isn’t shunt off into some apolitical landscape where he doesn’t have opinions on things. He feels strongly about the cruelty being perpetrated by those with power whom he views as not using it responsibly.

Consider the opening scene of the fourth issue, focusing on the 1990’s era of Spider-Man. By that time period, Peter has become the CEO of his own corporation, one that is doing quite well for itself. Tony Stark offers to buy out Peter’s shares in the company (in his words “merging” the companies under the Stark Industries name) so that he can work move into the communications business (as it would be much easier to buy out a company that’s already in that business than start from scratch). Tony thinks that Peter would rather be in his lab doing experiments than the boring, day to day work of a CEO, he even says as such. So confident is he, that Tony came himself rather than call his lawyers or do the more traditional hostile takeover. All Tony wants to know is what it’ll take for the company to be in his hands instead of Peter’s.

Peter responds, quite bluntly, “Stop making weapons.” Tony, naturally, is pissed that Peter would dare suggest that an American hero such as him should just stop being that hero. He built the weapons that saved America from the Russian War and keep peace across the world while this punk kid makes cell phones. Tony Stark saved Mary Jane’s life, Peter’s kids’ lives, and countless other lives. Peter responds by insinuating, in the most unsubtle terms imaginable, that Tony has also been selling his weapons to various regimes across the world. A Real Hero, this Tony Stark fellow is. He has the smarts to create technology that could help people walk or see when they couldn’t before. And he decides to instead build weapons that make a lot of money.

Conversely, there’s Peter’s relationship with Reed Richards in the second issue (set in the 70’s). There, Peter is working as a fellow scientist at Reed’s Future Foundation, where they do work that helps the world. And yet, Peter feels they could be doing more. He confronts Reed on the matter, highlighting the way in which the clothing the Fantastic Four wear alone could revitalize the world. Reed’s response is something akin to an anthropologist not wishing to impact a culture that they’re not a part of. Peter responds that Reed is part of that culture, to which Reed makes the case that if any action is done, then that would lead to a slippery slope of superheroes taking over the world. And while such things are an issue, using the slippery slope fallacy as an argument not to do something has always been a rubbish argument.

You might have noticed something about the two relationships presented. Despite twenty years passing by, Reed remains a scientist working in his lab. And despite forty years going on, Tony is still a war profiteer. They remain in the stories they were created from. Peter, by contrast, has gone from a college student to an assistant to the head of a company. He’s lost friends and family to time and war.

There’s a concept within comics called the illusion of change that claims that the superhero never really changes. They’ll always go back to the same status quos that governed their lives. Iron Man will always be a billionaire playboy, Captain America a soldier out of time, Jessica Jones a detective. But Spider-Man can never have that luxury, because there is no Status Quo to go back to. For Spider-Man can never again be a high school student. The story of Spider-Man is a story about change.

Consider the longest run on Spider-Man, that by Dan Slott. His run begins with Peter Parker as a lay about failure whose genius is being wasted. He could have been the next Steve Jobs, but instead he’s taking pictures of Spider-Man. But over the course of that run, he becomes a mad scientist working to make the world a better place, Otto Ocatvius trying to be a better man, a CEO of a big tech company that could change the world, and finally a reporter at the Daily Bugle focusing on the scientific advancements going on in the world.

Hell, look at the Lee/Ditko era of Spider-Man. That whole story is about a young kid growing from being a selfish little jerk who only looks out for himself to fighting impossible odds just to save one life. DeMatteis’ two eras look at how the traumatic experiences Peter has gone through have changed who he is and how he functions in a way that no one had done before. Strazynski opted to make Spider-Man a more mystical figure while simultaneously putting him in his most mundane setting as a schoolteacher. The worst, least memorable eras of Spider-Man have always thought of themselves as being throwbacks to a previous era without doing anything new with the character. Spider-Man thrives on the new, the different.

Hell, even attempts at shunting Peter back into an older status quo ultimately force things to be radically altered. One More Day being the most famous example wherein the undoing of 20 years of development could only be done through something that’s so out of what most people consider the thematic interests of Spider-Man. Even putting aside the quality of that story, that return to status quo ultimately is so massive, it’s more of a shift in the status quo than a return to one.

Which is perhaps the core of what Spider-Man: Life Story is doing. Many a Spider-Man fan has joked (or made a serious case) that Peter Parker’s life is a never-ending cascade of misery and pain where everyone close to him ultimately suffers and dies because of him. They point to Gwen Stacy or Ned Leeds or the countless other Spider-Man supporting characters who have died (all three of them). They’ll talk about how Peter’s home life is being ruined by his need to be Spider-Man. And while there may be a grain of truth in that claim, it ultimately misses the larger issue at hand: Spider-Man is a story about change in a universe that runs on the illusion of it. And that’s terrifying. 

Spider-Man: Life Story, by contrast, removes that illusion. For all that Tony and Reed remain where they were when they started, there are consequences for them remaining in place. Sue leaves Reed because he just won’t leave the lab to have a conversation that isn’t about science. Tony grows more and more villainous by the day, outright declaring himself to be the baddie. Captain America finds himself disillusioned by the Vietnam War and worked to save as many people as he could from the bloodshed.

And what of Spider-Man? Well, at the time of this writing, his story remains unfinished. That is, after all, the nature of Spider-Man and indeed all serialized fiction of this type: to lack an ending. But Spider-Man: Life Story is one that needs an ending. It’s not ongoing and it purports to be his life story. And all lives end the same way. All things considered, Peter will probably die in the next issue and the final issue will focus on what he leaves behind. It will look at the world that has changed because of Spider-Man and in particular those he has inspired to be heroes (which is to say “Miles Morales”), to fight to change the world and make it better than it was before. For all the darkness, all the horror, all the cruelty, Spider-Man is ultimately a hopeful story about the growth of a single person into a better version of himself. And really, that’s all we can hope to do with our lives and our capacity to change: be better.

That is, after all, what his sad final statement on Norman Osborn amounts to: “You could have been so much more. Even after everything, you had a son who loved you. But what were you doing? Plotting revenge, locked in battle with me.” He could have been more than a sad, petty little man. He could have helped, even if it was just himself to be better. Because, in spite of everything, Peter believed that he could. It’s not easy changing who you are or how you act. But it’s possible to stop being a jerk.

Who Pulls Your Strings and Makes You Dance. (SSSS.Gridman)

Commisioned by Fidel Jiron Jr.

A few years back, when I was a freshman in college, I wrote a short story. It’s not that good, all things considered. It’s a bit too crap to actually share with you, but it’s thematically relevant. It was a second person story about someone writing a short story. They were lacking any ideas as to what they were writing, when suddenly someone came into their room. (I think I wrote the story with the assumption that the “you” was a guy, but I never actually provided any pronouns or gendered language to “you.”) After a brief conversation, they proceed to have sex. (Again, Freshman in high school.) After having non-descript sex for many hours, “you” comes to the realization that “you’re” still typing. When you read what you’ve been typing, you notice that that what you’re typing is the words being read in the short story. At first, you laugh it off. But then you look at the person (woman, let me be honest) you had sex with, only to see that you have no idea what they actually look like. Because you (I) didn’t give them any physical descriptions, not even a name. At first, you try to come up with some character designs and names, but you screwed up in the worst way possible (no, I’m not saying how. It was awful and I regret everything about it) and try to revise the description to be less horrible.

But then, the implications dawn on you about creating a fictional real person who exists just to have sex with you. Who has no choice but to have sex with you. Who is forced to have sex with you. And then, all the other implications hit me: what about all the other people in the world? Who are they and what lives do they live? What right did I have to dictate their lives, their stories? So, I broke down and called for my mother. Suddenly, your mother appeared as a comfort to you. And then, a dreadful thought came into our minds: what is our mother’s name? All she says of herself is that she’s our mother, but we can call her mommy. Mortified by the lack of imagination on the part of the writer, you try to figure a way out (just as you look at a conveniently placed mirror and realize that you don’t look like anything at all. Just a vague set of body parts). The ultimate solution I came up to escape: “And then, you woke up from this weird dream.”

SSSS.Gridman is, in many ways, a better expression of this existential dread. If one finds oneself the god of a fictional world, the writer to use the honest phrase, why make nothing bad happen? After all, stories tend to involve some conflict, be it friends moving, people you love dying, or giant monsters attacking the city. If nothing bad happened to people, then the story would be boring. But you’re the writer, so if people actually died, if there was actual damage, then you could simply reset the world and move those deaths to a point prior to the story so none of the characters feel bad. The horror of a monster of the week show with negative continuity writ large.

For that matter, why have empathy for characters who don’t work within the narrative? Those Scrappy Doos, those Wesley Crushers, those bad characters whose stories just aren’t working. Or, for that matter, the characters whose stories feel like they need to end in their deaths. Not because you hate them or anything, but because it’s the right way to go for the story. This isn’t a concern of SSSS.Gridman, but it is on my mind since I read Satoshi Kon’s Opus recently, which also deals in these themes. The point is, aren’t fictional characters, especially the ones we interact with, real. Not in the sense of you or I, but they still have an impact on lives, on other people’s stories. More people know who Spider-Man or Scott Free are than they will Sean Dillon.

SSSS.Gridman is about growing a sense of empathy towards the characters we create. Even the Scrappies. It might seem better to have a story without the characters we don’t like, but it wouldn’t be the story we liked if they weren’t there at all. They’re as much a part of the story as the ones we do like, the quiet scenes of character drama, and the rip-roaring action of Kaiju fights. The world would be something different without the queers, the weirdoes, and me. After all, though it may be a dream to Akane Shinjō, but it’s real to everyone else.

Many writers, myself included, come to the dilemma of what to do when we have empathy for our characters. It becomes hard to do horrible, awful things to them. To have them fight monsters or even create monsters. Of course, what does that say about the writer of our world. Our evil mastermind behind the scenes, the wicked puppeteer who pulls our strings and makes us dance. Who can live with all the horrible things that happen in our world.

The answer, of course is that it’s not real for them. It’s just a story. More than likely, I’m some minor character in the background of someone else’s story. But when Akane was in the dream, they were real in the sense of you or I and not fictional like she is to us. Writers forget that detail when we write ourselves into the narrative. We can forget to have empathy for the people around us and think them as much fictional characters with ticks and repeated tropes as the characters we create.

That’s the metaphor for being a writer in one’s own story after all: how do we treat other people, even the ones we don’t like? Do we see them as not being people, thus acceptable to murder? Do we see them as tools, as a means to an end? Or do we see them as people? Broken people, angry people, cruel people, kind people, happy people, but people nonetheless. We are full of multitudes, even the worst of us. And we can’t stop those who don’t see others as people if we don’t see them as people in the first place. (I mean, you can, but you'd just be treating symptoms rather than the disease.)

I’m Sorry; I Just Don’t Have Much to Say About (True Romance)

Commissioned by Ted Adams

A few months back, I caught some flack by noted critic who’s better than me at literary criticism, Will Brooker, over a political compass I made based on the films of Quentin Tarantino by saying that True Romance was a Quentin Tarantino film. In my defense, True Romance is the only work by Tarantino out at the time that would be considered purely “Authoritarian Right” (other than Kill Bill Vol. 1, but I had to stick the two Kill Bills together) and I was quite cross at Tarantino at the time.

At the time, another critic who’s much better at this than me, Scout Tafoya, did a video examining the film and found it… wanting for a lot of obvious reasons, not the least of which being “it has one of Quentin Tarantino’s most racist monologues in it and it’s extremely uncritical of the guy who’s blatantly supposed to be Quentin Tarantino.” That’s not to say that people haven’t made the case for it. I’m sure another critic better at this than me, like Lindsey Romain, could make the case for it. But I just don’t have the energy to do so.

So instead, let’s talk, briefly, about a song from the Estelle album True Romance: All That Matters. Normally when I talk about music, I take a lyric by lyric analysis of the song with occasional noting of the more musical aspects of it, but the beauty of All That Matters is more in how the song is performed than in its lyrics. Not that the lyrical component isn’t important, but rather that one can’t quite capture the soulful longing of Estelle’s voice through simply talking about the symbolism of the music.

Every aspect of the song goes into the core theme of All That Matters: that of a love that was true and honest, but now is no longer. The instruments low tones and slow beat give the song an air of melancholy and distance. Estelle’s singing is beautiful as ever, but also aches with the absence of her true love. That’s ultimately the sign of a True Romance: the hole it leaves behind when it’s gone. The original ending of the film had the blatant Tarantino stand in die and Alabama, the female lead, reveal that she didn’t actually love him. She was in a bad place and needed a way out. Theirs was not a True Romance.

But then, lies are part of the point for Tarantino. His films, after all, largely deal with the stories we tell ourselves to keep us going, to protect us from those who would do us harm, the lies that shape the world. But there’s a truth lying underneath the lies, the stories, the movies we watch. The Tarantino stand in, in the original script, thought that one date was enough to create a True Romance. But, as Estelle notes, it’s the moments together that make up a True Romance. But, as she also notes, all that matters is the time we’ve spent together. Sometimes, you only get the length of a movie.

What is your favorite Tarantino film?
Reservoir Dogs (Libertarian Left)

True Romance (Authoritarian Right)

Natural Born Killers (Right Axis)

Pulp Fiction (Libertarian Axis)

From Dusk ‘till Dawn (Authoritarian Axis)

Jackie Brown (Libertarian Left)

Kill Bill (Libertarian Right) [Vol. 1- Authoritarian Right; Vol. 2- Libertarian Axis]

Death Proof (Libertarian Left) [Me]

Inglorious Bastards (Left Axis)

Django Unchained (Authoritarian Left)

The Hateful Eight (Authoritarian Left)

Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood (All Four Quadrants)

I don’t like Quentin Tarantino films at all (Libertarian Left or Authoritarian Right)

I think Pulp Fiction is his best, while Jackie Brown, Death Proof, and at least one Kill Bill are his worst (Authoritarian Right)

Run. Run You Clever Little Boy. And Remember Me. (The Clara Trilogy)

Commissioned by Freezing Inferno

Midway writing the original idea for this post, I realized I was approaching it from the wrong angle. Initially, I was going to do a semi sequel to my Faction Paradox/Clara Echo short story “The Eyes of Her Double” that would be structurally akin to the Utena post I wrote a while back, i.e. focusing on three characters from that story in a way that would mirror what happens in the Clara Trilogy (that being Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent). Some of the lines were somewhat good (the opening to the Face the Raven one would’ve been “It’s 2019 and there are concentration camps in America). However, as I went on writing it, I kinda hit a wall in the process. This happens from time to time, so I did what I always do when I hit a wall: procrastinate and go for a walk.

While on my walk, it occurred to me that I didn’t like what I was writing. The direction I was going with the Face the Raven one required an amount of trust the audience needs to give me that I don’t think I built up (the Clara echo of that story would’ve been a bus driver to the camp, but revealed at the end to be taking them to a refugee town that ties into the psychogeograpic/liminal space themes of Face the Raven, but I felt I wasn’t pulling it off as well as I could. Maybe some other day). I had no idea what I was doing with the Heaven Sent one, and Hell Bent ultimately rejected the premise of “stories about Clara echos” to be a Seventh Doctor story that’s also a sequel to the Rose book. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t happy with what I was writing.

And so, I returned to the drawing board. Fortunately one such idea has been mulling around in my head for a while, arguably since Series 7 of Doctor Who. But first, I must talk briefly about one of the major criticism levied against the Clara Trilogy: Clara should not have survived at the end of the story. One of the first times I saw the argument was in a video wherein the person arguing it claimed that the reasons she should have died was because she took risks in order to emulate the Doctor, who knows what they are doing.

Putting aside that the argument is essentially “girl does something that man does but fails because man know what he’s doing“ (the video was made prior to Jodie Whittaker being cast as the Doctor), to say the Doctor know what the hell they’re doing is complete and utter rubbish. The Doctor explicitly has no idea what they are doing. Even the incarnation typically seen as having the most idea of what they’re doing (that being the one played by Sylvester McCoy) is, upon closer examination, only slightly aware of what he’s doing. Note how practically every single one of his clever schemes from Paradise Towers to Gabriel Chase to the Master’s furry phase has inevitably ended with “Oh crap, it looks like I’ll have to improvise after all.” The Doctor doesn’t even know how to turn off the TARDIS’ brakes for crying out loud.

But there’s also an undercurrent of a critique of the Moffat era as a whole that the Clara Trilogy works wonderfully as a counter towards. That being why aren’t there consequences? To understand the question, we must understand what people mean when they say “Consequences.” After all, the consequence of, say, the Doctor being sent to a space station where the space suits are trying to kill the employees has the consequence of the space suits being fought against. Or, to use a more critical example, the Doctor visiting the Kerblam factory ends with the Doctor scolding the people fighting against the system that did nothing wrong and the employeesget two months off with two weeks paid leave . (Somebody please commission me to write about Kerblam. I have an angle that will be weird, but enlightening.)

However, this is not what people mean by consequences. Perhaps the best summation comes from Mr TARDIS, a YouTuber who I once followed until he said that the problem with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was that the Death of Gwen Stacy was enough of Peter’s fault. In a recent tweet thread about the problems of Steven Moffat (which mostly showed that the only people good at pointing out the problems of Steven Moffat are people who generally like his work and Jack Graham), he mentioned that his big issue with the Moffat era was the lack of consequences. Upon elaborating, he said “Clara returning in S9 rendered her and the Doctor's arc in S8 pointless and in S9 she didn't even die and got to live forever and before Capaldi regenerated it turns out he remembered her.Yes, S8 and S9 are consequence free.”

Let us put aside the issue regarding Clara’s return in Series 9 negating Series 8 as that would require a focus on the whole of Clara that I AM NOT PREPAIRED TO WRITE. Rather, his comments on Clara’s survival at the end of the Clara Trilogy highlight the nature of consequences in regards to this critique: they are static, bad things that happen to the main characters. Once they happen, they can never be contradicted by the consequences of other things. Nor can they cascade into other consequences that contradict the initial ones.

That is, after all, the central storytelling structure of the Moffat era: the farcical cascade of consequences from something rather small. Let us use the Clara Trilogy as our example as that is what this post is ostensibly about. The story begins with the relatively small event of a neighborhood kid named Rigsy being framed for a crime he didn’t commit involving an alien. The consequence of this is that Rigsy has a tattoo on his neck that’s counting down to zero. To prevent this, Clara decides to buy some time by taking the tattoo on herself, which has the consequence of her death. Equally, the consequence of the Doctor trying to solve the mystery of Rigsy’s death is that he gets sent to a torture chamber where he dies over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until he escapes into Galifrey, which has the natural consequence most times have of the Doctor entering a corrupt system: the Doctor tears it down. Once the powers that be are removed, the Doctor proceeds to cut Clara out of Face the Raven and into Hell Bent. The consequences of this are time and space being rent asunder, the Doctor’s memories being wiped, and Clara getting her own TARDIS and staring in a book series showrun by Caitlin Smith.

The issue people like Mr TARDIS seem to have is that the consequence of Clara taking the tattoo seems to be undone by the consequence of the Doctor deciding to edit out Clara from Face the Raven. There are two ways to deal with this. The first would be that Clara is probably going to go back to that moment. Though she doesn’t have Amy Pond’s attachment to her memories, Clara still has some level of value of them: “These have been the best years of my life, and they are mine. Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past. I am entitled to that. It's mine.” As shown by the character of Me, it is possible for an immortal being to forget their own past. As such, once her memories start to fade beyond recognition, Clara will probably return to the Time Lords to be returned to her moment of death. (That, or do something more interesting, but we’ll get to that later.)

The second issue is that the argument is complete bunk. To put it into real life terms, it’s like saying that because you went to the hospital to get your arm fixed, there were no consequences to the arm breaking in the first place. Some might argue that the time travel aspects of the story negate this, but… look, I’m going to be blunt. The argument of Clara not dying is lame. It’s a lame idea that doesn’t go anywhere beyond “And now, Peter Capaldi’s sad because he had to wipe away Clara’s memories like he did Donna.” This fetishization of static consequences ultimately results in the lamest shit that leads to things like Big Finish doing a story where they kill everyone they can because it’s dark and edgy.

Is it not enough that Clara isn’t on the show anymore? Do we really have to add a female character dying to the mix? And especially one as interesting as Clara. Someone who embraces her vices to make other people’s lives better. A thrill seeking junkie who pushes too far and expects too much. Someone who has a drive that pushes her to become impossible and gradually dislodged from the world. A woman who is never cruel nor cowardly. Who will never give up, and never give in. Whose kindness takes the form of looking for crying children being ignored and making the world a place where the cause of tears has been solved. Who looks at a world with terrible stories and opts to tell better ones. The ending to Clara’s story could never be something as simple and mundane as death or retirement. The consequence of creating a character such as Clara Oswald is that she was inevitably going to steal a TARDIS and run away.

(Since someone is going to ask, no, it does not negate the metaphor. Time travel stories are full of stories about people going back and changing things for the better. That’s literally what Quantum Leap is about. And given that time and space were supposedly being rent asunder when she was out, Clara being returned to her time of death is an inevitability. There’s still her body lying on the street after all. Of course, some other writer could come up with a story wherein a clone of her is put in her place and the tattoo is removed through other means. A lot can happen in a split second after all. The point of the article is that thinking Clara being dead is more interesting than Clara being alive and traveling the universe with her ever growing harem of space bisexuals is a lame way of looking at the story. Plus, you know, The Clara Trilogy is more invested in the relationship between Clara and the Doctor than it is in time travel mechanics.)